Month: January 2022

President Biden's vaccination mandate for businesses with over 100 employees is dead. The Supreme Court killed it earlier today.

But what about states? They can still pass vaccination mandates if they want to. California, for example, was all ready to pass one a few months ago but then put it on hold after the 5th Circuit Court struck down the federal mandate:

Cal-OSHA is empowered to write statewide rules as long as they meet or exceed any federal standard, and in fact it met last week in part to do just that with regard to COVID and large companies. But the board subsequently backed down, saying it would wait for the federal case to be resolved.

Well, the federal case has now been resolved, which means that states are free to move ahead. So far, though, all I've heard is a bunch of crowing from red state governors who are thrilled that the Supreme Court has beaten back this assault on our freedoms.

But what about blue states? Are any of them putting mandates in place? Illinois has already done it, but California hasn't yet. Neither have New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, or other big blue states. This is something to watch over the next few weeks.

Is it worth mentioning that there's no such thing as a filibuster anymore? Everyone in both parties now agrees that any bill can be passed with a simple majority merely by having the Senate Majority Leader raise a point of order saying so. If this is ultimately sustained by a majority of the Senate, then the bill can be passed with a majority vote.

That's it. Any bill can be passed with a majority vote simply by tacking a few minutes of procedural hocus pocus onto it. Any majority leader can do this at any time, and as often as he or she cares to.

The only real obstacle to this is a sort of gentleman's agreement not to do it. That's it.

A recent investigation of ticketing in Chicago produced a dismal result:

A ProPublica analysis of millions of citations found that households in majority Black and Hispanic ZIP codes received tickets at around twice the rate of those in white areas between 2015 and 2019.

....The coronavirus pandemic widened the ticketing disparities....In 2020, ProPublica found, the ticketing rate for households in majority-Black ZIP codes jumped to more than three times that of households in majority-white areas.

Racist cops? Unconscious bias? No. These are tickets issued automatically by red-light cameras and speed cameras:

From California to Virginia, citizens groups, safety organizations, elected officials and others are pointing to cameras as a “race-neutral” alternative to potentially biased — and, for many Black men, fatal — police traffic stops. And more funding for cameras may be coming: The federal infrastructure bill passed last fall allows states to spend federal dollars on traffic cameras in work and school zones.

The obvious conclusion from this is that Black drivers speed more than white drivers and run red lights more than white drivers. But this possibility is literally not even mentioned in the entire 4,000-word article.

So what's the explanation? The authors believe it's because streets in majority Black neighborhoods tend to be wide and straight, like this:

Conversely, streets in white neighborhoods tend to be narrow and curvy, which automatically induces drivers to slow down.

Maybe so—though the authors present only the thinnest evidence for this. And of course it does nothing to explain why Black drivers run red lights at much higher rates than white drivers.

The authors also suggest the Black-white disparity has something to do with proximity to freeways, density of neighborhoods, and violent crime rates. But all of this stuff is correlated, so it's just another way of saying "low-income Black neighborhoods."

It sure is a lot of words, and a lot of tap dancing, just to avoid acknowledging the possibility that Black drivers speed more than white drivers. Especially since the authors acknowledge that speed cameras really do work to enhance safety, thus keeping actual existing Black neighborhoods safer.

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But I will say this: why doesn't the city put up signs warning drivers that a speed camera is ahead? After all, they say the purpose of the cameras isn't to raise money, it's to get people to slow down. Wouldn't a warning sign be pretty effective at getting people to slow down?

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On a separate note, the article also discusses the burden of "fees and fines" on the Black community. It's one thing to get a ticket if you're a middle class white person—you just grumble and pay it—but quite another if your income is low and you don't always have $100 or $200 lying around. So you put it off, and then the late fees pile up, and then you're even further in debt, etc.

My favorite technocratic approach to this is to scale fines to income. For example, a particular speeding ticket might cost you 0.2% of your income:

I wonder how hard something like this would be to implement? I wonder how many affluent folks would scream about it?

This photo was an experiment. I was curious whether the moon (outside the frame) cast enough light to illuminate the snowy mountains while still allowing the stars to show up.

As you can see, the answer was yes, though it took a fair amount of Photoshopping to get there. I should have shot this as a composite, with different exposures for the town lights, the mountains, and the sky. For some reason, though, I didn't think of that.

The unemployment rate of Black workers is always higher than it is for white workers. Usually, the gap widens during recessions and then gradually narrows as the economy recovers. Here's the gap for men:

The gap is now below 4%, but still not near its historical low of 2%, reached just before the pandemic. Here's the gap for women:

In general, the gap between Black and white women has always been a little less than the gap for men, but otherwise the general shape of things is the same. The gap for women is now about 3%, but still not near its historical low of 1%, reached just before the pandemic.

Things are a little slow this morning, so let's talk about national ID cards:

in two years i have never had to show a vaccine card or ID to get into any grocery store but erickson's casual dishonesty aside I will make a trade: we can have mandatory voter ID for all elections if we also have free universal ID (and registration) for all eligible Americans. https://t.co/Pqb5Lo7xlS

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) January 13, 2022

Longtime readers will recognize this as a hobbyhorse of mine that I haven't mentioned lately. After all, what's the point? Everyone hates the idea.

But we shouldn't. A national ID card would be a huge convenience, especially for those at the bottom of the income ladder who don't have driver licenses or credit cards. It would be great for identifying yourself to vote and for proving your work status when you apply for a job. Those are both things that conservatives should appreciate.

And the downside? Virtually nothing. The main objection is that national ID is a sign of living in a "Papers please!" police state, but that's nonsense. Lots of countries—including Spain, Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and dozens of others—provide national ID cards and have nonetheless managed to remain free and democratic. That's especially true since no one would be required to have a national ID. It would simply be available to everyone.

The other big objection is that a national ID card is a way for the government to keep track of you. But that ship sailed a long time ago. The government already keeps track of you. They assign your Social Security number. They keep track of your criminal record. They dole out driver licenses. A national ID card does nothing to change that.

There's really no reason to object to a national ID and every reason to think it would be a great convenience. There would be a certain number of extremists on both sides who would resolutely refuse to cave in to the deep state and get one, but that's fine. It would still be nice if the other 95% of us could have one.

Just for fun, here are the top ten biggest price gainers over the month from November to December, along with the top ten price decliners:

There is no point to be made about this. I just thought you might find it entertaining.

The most interesting thing I found here is that men's shirts rose at a spectacular annualized rate of 52%, while men's underwear dropped at an annualized rate of 27%. I suppose if I knew anything about menswear, maybe I'd know that these are completely different markets that have nothing to do with each other. But they seem kind of similar, don't they?

And how is it that food served at elementary schools dropped at an astronomical annualized rate of 154%? Did some kind of federal aid program suddenly go into effect in December?

Why are beef prices so high? Is it because the meatpacking industry is monopolized by four big companies who are exploiting their pricing power at a moment of maximum leverage?

Let's find out. The USDA maintains an astonishing set of statistical data, including 50 years of pricing data. Conveniently for us, one of the things they track is the "spread," the difference between the price of beef at the ranch, at the meatpacker, and at the supermarket. Without further ado, here it is since 2010:

In order to track this fairly, I've eliminated two recent episodes of huge, short spikes caused by the pandemic. The result is what you see: ranchers sell beef at about $1 more than their cost while meatpackers are selling for about $3.50 more.

(Note that this is not profit. It's merely the difference in price. To calculate profit we'd need to subtract the cost of production.)

At the same time, beef production has been steadily rising:

It's hard to see much of anything here. Meatpackers have enjoyed a bit of a rise just in the past three months, but otherwise have been on a flat trendline since about 2016. Ranchers have been on an upswing since 2015, rising from 50 cents to around a dollar. This is likely because they have to make up for higher feed and other production costs.

Finally, the USDA says that the retail price of a pound of beef has gone up about $1.50 over the past two years while the total spread from ranch to supermarket has gone up about $1. This means that supermarket spreads have gone up about 50 cents.

Oddly, what this all suggests is that ranchers and supermarkets are responsible for most of the increase in the price of beef. Meatpackers, aside from a couple of very short recent spikes, are marking up beef about the same as they have since 2016.

None of this means that everything is well. Meatpackers may be squeezing ranchers unfairly thanks to their monopoly power. However, when it comes to the price of beef on the supermarket shelf, they seem to be fairly blameless.

UPDATE: One of the quickest ways of checking out the overall health of a company is to simply look at its stock price. If it's raising prices at will and collecting monster profits, its stock price should soar. Here are the stock prices of the Big Four meatpackers in the US:

Marfrig is doing OK, but the other three are sucking wind. Investors sure aren't impressed by their alleged ability to jack up prices whenever they feel like it.

This is a picture of the cruise ship terminal at the Port of Los Angeles with the Vincent Thomas Bridge in the background. It is, needless to say, a drone photo. You just can't get a picture like this from ground level.

Via Tyler Cowen, here's an interesting look at the American executive class. In "The Political Polarization of United States Firms" three researchers report that in large firms the share of Republican executives has grown from 63% in 2008 to 71% in 2018. That's a pretty big increase for ten years.

But there's more! The authors take those two numbers and run simulations to show how partisan individual companies should be. Then they compare that to reality:

In 2008, actual partisanship (the red line) is fairly close to what you'd expect. But by 2018 it's moved considerably. Executive teams are much more partisan than you'd expect based on random hirings and firings.

What this means is that executives are increasingly choosing to work for companies with compatible politics. Republicans are wary of joining, say, Silicon Valley firms, while Democrats are wary of joining energy companies. And if they do join companies dominated by the other party, they're more likely to leave.

This is the same dynamic we see in residential areas, where we increasingly sort ourselves geographically into regions and neighborhoods that are politically congenial. It's yet another sign that politics has gotten so toxic that we're doing more and more to avoid even associating with members of the other team.